Papervision3D brought 2D Flash into a 3D world. It’s exciting and there are lots of cool websites and applications developed with PV3D. But nothing is perfect in the world. It also has some limitations:

PV3D requires heavy processing power. Most of current works (or current good ones) use simple geometries and the screen sizes are generally small.

3D models in PV3D are far less beautiful than rendered 3D videos. A PV3D scene is very raw, the edges are not anti-aliased and the surfaces are not smooth. Even though “pixelation is a in thing nowadays”, but there are times that high definition suits the style.

There are lightings, shadings and effects but they require more processing power, not surprisingly.

Pure 3D projects are easier to implement but it’s hard to mix 3D with 2D.

Texts are not very legible unless they are bigger than usual sizes used in 2D .

All these limitations, especially processing power related issues need to be sorted out before jumping into the trend. There are new challenges brought to both designers and developers. For designers, it’s hard to come out new, cool and user friendly navigations and layouts. Even though 3D technologies has been there for a long time, but using 3D environment to present information is very new. Titles like 3D website/UI designer or 3D usability specialist do not exist, yet. For developers, efficient code is more important when processing power is a real issue.